Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (24 page)

“And you told no one you were coming here?” she asked.

“Of course not,” Howard told the fairy lady. “They would have laughed at me.”

“Yes,” she agrees, “I believe they would have,” and with that, she plunged the sharpened tines of a shed deer’s antler deep into his belly and twisted it sharply, first to one side and then the other. Though she did nothing whatsoever to dull his pain, he didn’t so much as flinch. The man from the convenience store stood stock still for the disemboweling, his eyes not drifting from her own. This surprised her, and she gave him another kiss for taking it so well, when surely he
must
have hoped the night would go another way entirely. She cradled him in her arms as his life drained away into the soil to feed the hungry toadstools and the earthworms and a ravenous host of brownies hiding just below the sod. The light in his eyes faded slowly, and he smiled while the fairy lady helped herself to no small portion of his liver. It was a delicacy she’d tasted all too infrequently, and she was grateful to this man for not having struggled. She might even have felt a twinge of regret, were she capable, so peaceful was his lace as death folded itself around him.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and he did. “Sleep here, and I will visit, from time to time.”

There was no need to dig a grave, as so little remained of him when she was done. She left only a scatter of bones, gnawed and broken open to reach the marrow inside. When she’d had her fill, she let the brownies crawl up from their subterranean nests and lick her hair and body clean. Then she dressed, and walked back through the park to the city that has far too many things to worry about to be bothered with fairies. No one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least. No one who is only a human man or woman. She returns to him, as she said she would, on the evenings that suit her fancy. She finds a weathered bit of shin bone in amongst the clover, or a scrap of skull that has not yet rotted away, and with it she bids him to rise and draws him forth from the ground there inside the ring of mushrooms, to dance with her beneath the moon and the stars and the lascivious eyes that watch from every corner of the night-bound wood. She gives him a new body woven not from blood and sinew, but from the earth, from roots and bugs and fallen leaves. She shapes his face from clay, trying as best she can to remember its angles, but recalling it less and less as time goes by. She gives him eyes she’s stolen from jaybirds, or a stray dog, or settles for two quarters from her coin purse. And never yet has the expression of awe faded from this rough simulacrum of his lost countenance, awe and delight and comprehension.

She kisses his lips, which are usually provided by convenient and agreeable garden slugs. Sometimes, she allows him to peer through the glamour that she guards more closely now, though usually it is only the pale, raven-haired woman with sage-green eyes that the ghost of Howard Groesbeck meets when he awakens. No matter. He knows the fairy woman wears the mask.

The moments themselves have become threads, and the threads have become tangled as the spool turns, reeling them out. The spool, I see, is time, and the threads are moments thrown free, unwound, and then left to dangle, to fray, to snarl one into the other until the integrity of each individual filament is lost. Together, they become something incoherent, and, yet also, something surpassing the need for mere coherence. We close our eyes, or I only close mine, and here I am trying foolishly to tease a single thread free again. You may as well call this action
memory
as to call it anything else. The spool turns, and days and words, similes and metaphors wrap, hopelessly, one about the other, all but indistinguishable. I can hear you speaking quietly in a sunlit room that smells of the cracked leather of old books, and of crumbling pages, and I think this is the first time that we ever talked. If this is the first time, then it may have all begun with the Norns, and, as you talk, you show me illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Johannes Gehrts and Ludwig Burger. Three woman seated or standing together among the gnarled roots of the World Ash, weaving fate, and you tick off their names one by one, as though I’m listening. I
hear
you, and I do hear you well enough that the moments are captured to then be wound about the spool and then
unwound
and matted into this grand tangle with all the rest. I am hearing the words spilling from your thin lips, but it is hard to think clearly of anything but that bright shimmer of auburn hair, a few strands of which have pulled free of your ponytail and now frame the pale mystery of your face. We sit together in the library, and your eyelids have been stitched shut, though I cannot see that this is proving any sort of inconvenience as you turn the crisp, dry pages and smile for me and breathe out hushed enthusiasm. “We are twined,” you say. “We are twined, all of us, but some
twinings
are more intimate than others. We are bound, and there is no unbinding, not in this existence, nor any that may come, or that may already have been.” But my fingers pick restlessly at the skein, never leaving well enough alone, and I lose the library and the three ladies and Arthur Rackham. I lose
you
, too, for a moment. It is a dazzling moment, laced with that terrible brittleness that precedes genuine panic. I pull another thread free, rolling it between thumb and forefinger, and
this
one here is a night in Boston, at the Kidder Smith Gallery, after our long, chilling walk in the snow along Newbury Street. There are severe black pedestals to support the tiny sculptures, and you’re telling me that you met the artist when you were in Tokyo last year. I know that you have never been to Tokyo, but I like the sound of the lie, so I don’t contradict you. “They are beautiful,” you say, and this
is
true. The dolls have been sculpted from polymer days, and a very few have been cast in bronze. Not one of these manufactured women is more than seven inches tall. On each black pedestal there are two figurines, although that is not precisely true. On each black pedestal stand two figurines caught in the act of becoming one. Unless the eye and mind assumes the process is one of unbecoming, and then they have been caught in the process of division. You’re talking, in whispers, about Eve and the
Midrash Kabbah,
the first man and woman created as a single hermaphroditic organism, and I point out that these figurines are all female. You laugh, and we move along to the next black pillar and the next fusing or dividing pair. “Did you ever imagine that you had a twin,” you say, leaning close and whispering directly into my left ear. “Only, something happened, and your twin was lost.” I’d never told you that, and it makes me angry for a second or two, hearing you say those things aloud, as though, somehow, you’ve stolen secret thoughts when I was distracted by these tiny women. “Does it frighten you?” and I allow your question to fill the space between us, unanswered, forcing you to continue. “Fear of disillusion, or assimilation? Becoming less or more than what you presently are?” I bend close to have a better look at the sculpture, not replying right away. I don’t want you to think that I’m easy. I don’t want to turn and see smug satisfaction in your eyes, to have guessed so much (though, I might have confessed it all, and then forgotten; I am certainly open to that possibility). The two tiny women have skin that is the color of the skin of an unripe apricot. The woman on the left has black hair, while the woman of the right has hair so fair it makes me think, again, of the snow piling up outside the gallery. They lean towards one another, hands on hips, hands on shoulders, but it is impossible to discern precisely where one ends and the other begins. Fingers have sunken into malleable flesh, or fingers have yet to manifest. The foreheads of the two women touch, and here, too, they are one, and white hair and crow-black hair is as snarled as all these moments that have become tangled threads. The two women, leaning together, bring to mind the letter A, and I almost tell you this. But you’re talking again, having apparently decided that no response to your questions are presently forthcoming. “They remind me of the letter A,” you say, speaking a little louder now, and I nod and gaze down at the sculpture. I’ve only just begun to comprehend—at this moment, within the weave of this strand—what has been set in motion, and so your words are more startling than they ought to be. I fail to grasp the inappropriateness of my anger and the sense of violation. I want to raise my hands and search my scalp for the window you must have put there in my sleep. It would be smooth, glass or Lucite, skillfully hidden, invisible unless one goes looking for it, a window into all my thoughts. “They spent time together in a sensory deprivation tank,” you tell me, and I realize I must be farther along this thread than I’d thought, because I’m not sure who you mean. I ask, and you reply, “The sculptor and her lover. That’s how this phase of her work began, this systematic deconstruction of individuality. So, they
are
fusing.” I want to touch the tiny women in front of me, thinking that perhaps my groping fingers could find answers and points of contact undetectable by my eyes alone. “Her lover,” you say, “a woman from Copenhagen, a painter, she had a sort of nervous breakdown, afterwards.” And then, by unspoken agreement, we move along down that narrow white space, the gallery’s throat, to the next pair. On the wall above and behind the sculpture is a small white card printed with the words, “The Love of Souls.”” I read it aloud, and you inform me that the title was possibly borrowed from a painting by a Belgian symbolist named Jean Deville. “He founded
Le Salon d’Art Idealiste
,” you continue, knowing that I lack your knowledge of art history, and so
also
knowing that this means next to nothing to me. I want to accuse you of showing off and lingering on trivia, but I know better. No strand emerging from off the spool is genuinely trivial. So, instead, I stand and stare at “The Love of Souls,” and you stand so close behind me I can feel the heat from your body. Or I only imagine that I can. I am fairly certain, though, that the two figurines on the pedestal before me are meant to represent the same two persons as those on the previous pedestal. The black-haired woman and the fair, and I wish I knew what the artist and her girlfriend look like. I wish I knew their faces. How literal has the sculptor been, in working through the aftermath of the experiences you have described? Thinking this, I feel suddenly like a voyeur, and I am sure that you see me blush, even though your eyelids are still sewn shut. On the pedestal there is a crow and a white dove, or a lump of coal to contrast with freshly fallen snow. Simple comparisons spring to mind (you have, on more than a single occasion, chided my fondness for metaphor, calling it an intellectual crutch, and I suspect you are correct). Two women, sitting now back to back, though, in truth, they share a single back. A single spine, bifurcating at the neck, affording each her own set of cervical vertebrae. The lair woman’s head is tilted forward at such an angle that her chin almost rests against the intersection of her clavicles and manubrium. In contrast, the dark-haired woman’s head is raised, as if gazing at the snowy night sky hidden by the gallery ceiling. The fair woman’s legs are splayed open in an immodest V, revealing her vagina, while her companion’s legs are pulled up close to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, fingers linked. “I don’t think I like seeing these,” I say. “I think I am not meant to see them.” You apologize for having dragged me out into the storm, and then for suggesting the installation, and I say no, you couldn’t have known that these pieces would make me uncomfortable. “Anyway, that’s the proper function of art, isn’t it?” I ask you. “To unsettle us?” and I force my eyes to Loiter on these Lilliputian figures, Siamese twins by different mothers. “I don’t pretend to know the proper function of art,” you say, but there is only the faintest bit of derision in your voice, just enough to make me wish that I’d said something else, instead. The spool turns, and the threads become so hopelessly tangled I sincerely wish that I were able to stop picking at them and simply accept the fact of this unsightly mess. I pull one that seems dyed a sort of indigo, and this is the night we first made love, then got stinking drunk on Pernod Anise. This is your cluttered loft, only a few blocks from Harvard Square. We lie together on the floor, and I’m telling you about the time I used a needle and thread to sew the fingers and thumb of my left hand together, sliding the needle all but painlessly into and through the uppermost layers of skin. I thought you would laugh, but you don’t. I’m
never
very good at making you laugh, even when we’re drunk and stupid from sex. “It didn’t hurt,” I say, and you reply, “Would that have made any difference?” I release the indigo thread, and, in its place, choose one the color of lichens or dead moss. I only tug very, very gently, hoping for no more than a glimpse, a glimpse at most, but! really should know better. I tug gently, but quite a lot of the green thread comes free of the tangle. “You’ll tell me if I hurt you? You’ll use the signal. You have to promise that you will,” and I do promise, even if my assurance is a lie. It
should
be painful, and I have, over the months, finally come to comprehend this. What we are seeking, it will not come without discomfort. It isn’t meant to. You use surgical thread and a twelve-gauge stainless steel needle, implant grade, and I sit up very straight and watch myself in the bathroom mirror as you work. The latex gloves on your fingers are soon red with my blood. There is more pain than I’d anticipated, as the needle enters and exits, exits and enters, but I don’t raise my hand to stop you. I need to
know
this sensation, if there is ever to be any progress towards a goal. And, besides, soon enough the rush of endorphins is making me giddy. We leave my mouth sewn shut for almost five hours. And then you snip the scabby thread with a pair of embroidery scissors. You sterilized them in boiling water and rubbing alcohol, and I have begun to worry that your fear of infection will hold us back. The first words I say when I can speak again are “Thank you.” And you respond, “You’re very welcome.” I choose an orange thread now, the gaudy, rich orange of a tangerine. I choose a tangerine thread from this varicolored complication, and when I touch it, you’re asking me again if I ever suspected I’d have a twin, someone who was lost, someone I only
almost
remember, but sometimes seem to miss more than I can endure. “Isn’t that a fairly common neurosis?” I ask. “Like thinking that you were adopted, but your parents kept it from you?” I stare at you a moment. And
in
this moment, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. No, you are the most beautiful
person.
“The sense that something is missing,” you say, prompting me. “That something has been
stolen
.” I nod, and speaking hardly louder than a whisper, I reply, “And I have always felt alone. There’s never been a time when I haven’t felt alone, except...” Rut I don’t finish the sentence, and you don’t push me. You change the subject, as you often do upon realizing how near you’ve come to the truth. “My mother cried for a week when she learned I was a lesbian,” you say, and it makes me laugh, because my mother never shed a tear, but said only that she’d always known I was a mistake. “She actually
said
that, a mistake?” you ask. “She said worse,” I tell you. I select a new thread, one that is almost the same shade of brown as your eyes, and I loop it snugly about my index finger. The spool turns, though there is no spool, reeling out these moments I have chosen to interpret as threads. Here we are having coffee, and I wish that I could recollect the name of the café. There is nothing at all remarkable about this thread, and so I treasure it, but almost immediately move along to another. “No,” you say “I’m not shitting you, this is truly bizarre,” and you stare out the window above my bed at a different thunderstorm than the one we watched, or will watch, from the nameless café. Beads of rain streak the glass, and when the thunderclaps are loud enough, the pane rattles in its aluminum frame. “You remember that I said the girlfriend had some sort of nervous breakdown, right?” And so I know you’re talking about the sculptor whose tiny women we saw on display at the Kidder Smith Gallery the previous January. “Yes,” I answer. “I remember.” There’s a flash of lightning, reflected on your face and the walls, and you wait for the thunder to come and go before continuing. “She became utterly obsessed,” you say. “After that business in the sensory deprivation tank, she became obsessed with the thought that her lover was in fact her twin
sister,
and not only that. She believed that they’d been conjoined at birth and surgically separated thereafter. She saw the figurines, the same ones that we saw, and she took this as a sort of confirmation, that the sculptor knew, as well.” I believe that you meant to deliver this story as though it were a joke, an anecdote so weird that I would be forced to laugh, but already the tone of your voice has changed. We are still three weeks away from the night you sew my lips together, but you know well enough what’s coming. It began with your questions, after all. Yours were the prying fingers, there at the start, and I’m quite certain I’d have remained silent, otherwise. That’s not blame, by the way, because there is no blame in me. It’s just that these threads and moments are become so tangled now, I’d at least like to try to be clear about my feelings. “Obsessed,” I say, and you nod and tell me that while the sculptor slept, the girlfriend used Krazy glue to fuse their bodies together. She smeared it on their legs and chest, their breasts and bellies, even the palms of their hands. She managed to glue the left side of her face to the right side of her partner’s face. A friend found them the next morning, and called an ambulance. I don’t ask what procedure or solvent was required to separate the two, or how the girlfriend accomplished all this without waking her victim, but you add that the sculptor has obtained a restraining order, though she isn’t pressing criminal charges. “How very kind of her,” I say, and the sarcasm and bitterness in my voice takes me aback. I’m not sure you even caught it. It was only a small bitterness, after all, like a hint of unsweetened chocolate or citrus zest. And I release the thread, so that the moment dissolves, which is not at all the same as its being forgotten. I cannot presently explain the difference, so you must take my word that the two things are not the same. You